You Can Now Try Firefox’s Vertical Tabs
howtogeek.com
- Firefox Nightly 131 introduces vertical tabs and an improved sidebar, enhancing tab management and multitasking for users with many open tabs.
- The vertical tabs feature, similar to Microsoft Edge, keeps tabs organized on the left-hand side and can be customized via Firefox Labs settings.
- Additional features include AI chatbot integration in the sidebar and ongoing development of tab grouping and profile management tools.
Looking forward to this one. I use vertical tabs on Edge at work and it's very useful on wide screens.
Hope they remembered to add a bottom to collapse/expand the tab bar.
Now we only need tab groups and we'll be all set.
I feel like I heard something about tab groups in nightly a while back? I'm using a tab group extension but it's not the same.
I remember using vertical tabs in Opera back in the day and feeling like a king. Can't wait to test this out
yeah i heard about tab groups too, idk how thats going (i dont use nightly, though i really should)
I don't use nightly either. I probably should too 😆
Oh, does this replace Tree Style Tabs?
Rather than replace, I'd guess it could be an alternative. The best part of it will be the ability to natively disable the top tab bar instead of needing a janky userchrome css hack that doesn't even fully work.
I don't quite see the lure of vertical tabs.
Nowadays most websites leaves half of your horizontal space empty on high resolution monitors, so you have a lot of unused real estate. Verticals tabs can also fit in more tabs while showing tab title and can implement features like collapsible tabs.
Tiling WM though?
I do, I have a 2K display with lots of horizontal space. Vertical tabs allow me to better group and see tab names in vertical space rather than trying to line up truncated tab names on a horizontal axis.
That's why I was against the AI integration for the image text-summary in the PDF. I knew Mozilla would not stop there and integrate more AI tools into the browser. As much as I love Firefox, as a user from version 1 days, this AI integration without an option to turn it off is a reason to switch... But I didn't found an alternative yet (I'm well aware of all the browsers).
I think it can be disabled, in the screenshot from the articles there is a "AI chatbots" toggle
I used the wrong word. I meant it can't be uninstalled (like an addon). It's just part of the browser. If this was an optional addon for people to uninstall or replace if they want, it would be fine. It's not the first time Mozilla did that, even outside of Firefox too.
Pretty sure LibreWolf will ship without the Ai. They normally remove invasive stuff before compiling rather than disabling it in a config later.
Until it re-enables itself like so many toggles in Firefox do after updates.
How about Mull?
It's on my list. One of my criteria is, it has to be in the official repository for Archlinux. And Mullvad-Browser, like many of the other Firefox based browsers, are not.
Weird. I wonder why.
Do we have tab groups yet?
Not yet. They're supposedly "working on it". This is the feature I'm most looking forward to.
So far it's not perfect yet, but I already switched to it. Very nice.
This is awesome, now if they switch to a JS engine that isn't slow and buggy on my laptop I have 0 reasons to use anything chromium-based anymore
I would much prefer they not become more chromified than they switching to chrome's JS engine.
I'm not saying they should switch to v8. Ideally they'd make their own performant JS engine but I doubt they actually have the resources for that. I'm just wishing for a browser that's actually good on all fronts even though it realistically cannot exist
optional ai chatbot integration, its opt-in
Oh great so techbro garbage is bloating up my install instead; much better
It is like 2 megabytes, it just embeds a webpage
2 megabytes too many ;)
Have you considered other people might want the feature?
If Mozilla is going to spend time and money and employee effort on this project, then they can just ship it as an optional extension instead of forcing users to install it by default.
Otherwise, you're just advocating for bloat. And at that point, I have to ask: what is your cutoff point for how much bloat is too much? Can they inject the 10 most popular add-ons on the marketplace? How about the 100 most popular? 1000?
Thing is, making the techbros happy makes me unhappy.
- Mozilla Manifesto Principle 4, amended